Week 12 Reflection

Week 11 Reflection

Final Exam

Week 10 Reflection

This week for the main discussion we were asked to develop questions about a previous topic from class that we wanted to discuss further.  I brought up the current state of United State law concerning IT and the topics surrounding IT such as privacy and personal security.  I found this area interesting as it is still in its infancy and is struggling to keep up with the development of technology.  Considering the rate at which technology grows and how slowly our government can move sometimes when developing new laws, it is not surprising that there are many holes in the law concerning these areas.  A personal example is when a friend started receiving numerous phone calls regarding a craigslist ad posted in the personals sections that they did not place.  The friend contacted craigslist who removed the ad and provided the IP address of the people who posted the ad.  But when the friend contacted the police they said tehy could not do anything because the IP was located in another state and they had no ability to conduct a cross state investigation concerning the incident.  So since this was harassment done through a new technology the Police had no idea on how to deal with the issue and this was still within the United States.  The same could occur from different countries which leaves the victim at even more of a disadvantage when they try and deal with the problem.  Bringing the topic back to what we dealt with in class, it is interesting to contemplate these issues and how governments will deal with such issues in the future.  Taking the example of intercountry crime, how will a government deal with a hacker in one country who steal identities and money from another country?

Week 9 Reflection

This week we had a discussion question that concerned business ethics.  The question concerned whether there was a crisis in business ethics currently.  I answered in the negative as business currently work in the same way that it always has.  Our text talked about two different philosophies of ethics that business must follow, the shareholder style and the social contract style.  The share holder declares that the business should only be concerned with the priorities of the shareholders as long as the law is followed.  The concern is of course to make money.  The second method is the social contract theory that says that business must operate under the constraints that society places upon the business as the business can only exist under the consent of the society.

Businesses obviously wish to follow the shareholder theory while those outside of business would wish for the social contract theory.  However businesses often forget the following the law part of the shareholder theory as there are countless examples of how businesses have ignored the law, or manipulated the law to increase profits.  Furthermore the higher level executives push to increase their personal levels of profit while decreasing their responsibility to society through paying less taxes.  The ability to accomplish a manipulation of the societal contract has also increased with the development of computer and Internet technology as it allows the business to extend its reach and work between international laws.  Executives can hide funds in offshore accounts to skip tax laws, businesses can open and close factories in third world countries that have lax laws concerning pollution or child labor.  Yet many of these things are currently legal because the social contract has been picked apart.

Week 8 Reflection

Week 7 Reflection

This week part of the study involved the concept of off shoring and outsourcing work to other companies.  This concept has become of particular interest due to the development and growth of the internet, as it now allow for offshoring or outsourcing of technical jobs rather then just manufacturing jobs as had been done previously for cars or electronics.  A main difference with these two styles of offshoring is the level of technical ability required by the worker.  The manufacturing level can be done by mostly unskilled laborers once the factory is in place.  The IT level work requires the workers to be trained to a higher level to deal with both the computer technical skills as well as the possible customer service skills which may include language courses.

These two different levels also allow for a discussion of how they effect the local economy of the country in which they are placed.  Many argue that the manufacturing helps the developing country and it is true to a certain extent.  But there is also the possibility for the manufacturing country to simply pull out the factories and move them to another country that is less developed if it is better for the company.  It may be better for the company to due this as it would allow them to avoid certain labor laws or perhaps a rising demand for higher wage due to a growth in the standard of living.

The higher trained IT jobs present a different version of this though.  Due to the need for a higher level of training it is better for the offshoring company to move into a country such as India that has the education already in place but still is not as developed as some Western countries to help defer costs.  But due to the nature of these jobs, it helps to grow the middle class rather then the working class as the jobs pay more and provide more advanced skills.  A person that gets trained for an IT position could then uses the skills to develop technical jobs within their home country.  This is in contrast to the manufacturing position that requires the funding of a large company to operate the factory.  The technical position could start small by providing online services that have little start up cost in comparison.

These are only a few thoughts on the subject but this topic has incredible depth to explore.

Week 6 Reflection

Mid Term Week

Week 5 Reflection

In week five we looked at the "dot com bubble" which I found interesting as I had never looked at it form a business perspective before.  I understood that a lot of the companies had failed but I never took the time to look into why they had failed.  Even with the short amount of time that we have looked into the reasons it struck me that one of the major reasons was the fervor of speculation.  It reminded me of the gold rush, a large amount of people rushing into a situation with very little knowledge about the situation but push themselves on because of the few people that had made money.  I always find it strange that such an important factor of our society can be manipulated to such a degree and cause such havoc, all because one sector of the market rose and fell so quickly.  Another interesting thing that I found out is the lack of business planning on the part of the businesses as well.  Many of the websites focused upon simply gathering as many visitors as possible but didn't think beyond that point.  The businesses never though to try and monetize the amount of visitors they gathered or they tried to maintain the large amount of visitors at a cost to the company.  Thus the company was operating at a loss with no real long term plan to try and turn that around.  It just bewilders me that people would do so much without a "real" plan that would account for things like this.  Why would you start a company without any real idea of how to try and make money with the business.  Of course there are all the dot com businesses that fell apart on purpose because of the greed, but that is a different side of the story.

Week 4 Reflections

For this week our mini project was to investigate twitter.  Many of my classmates made the point that they really didn't see any point for twitter for an average user.  They equated the service as something that allowed a person to shout out that they just ate breakfast or took a shower.  In other words a useless service.  I would tend to agree with them for the most part, especially if the service is used in that manner.  But I made the point that Twitter has allowed some amazing events to occur such as live tweeting from the revolutions that were occurring in Libya and Egypt.  Even something not as extreme as that can occur with tweets from the Occupy Wall Street movement allow a view into the event for those who are not part of it or can not be there themselves.  I think that something like Twitter has to be judged on what it can be used for rather then what it is used for a majority of the time.  To try and provide a similar example look towards Google.  If you let the auto finish complete some of your searches you will find that people use google for some inane things or at least very, very, strange things.  Google is the most powerful search tool that humanity has created so far and is capable of performing some awesome tasks.  Yet people are searching for cats playing piano pictures.

Week 3 Reflections

This week we covered the concept of data at rest which is a term that can often refer to data stored on media devices such as laptops or external hard drives.  Reading more about this subject led me to learn that a large portion of data breeches occur from outside forces gaining physical access through a lost or stolen laptop rather then any actual hacking or encryption break.  This makes the idea of internet security funny in a way when the image portrayed in the movies as expert hackers making their way into secure systems when the truth is closer to the Apple employee who left the Iphone concept in a bar.  It is interesting to think that a lot of problems for data loss occur because of human error or simple mistakes rather then an actual malicious "hack."

Week 2 Reflections

Within the conferences this week we had to read about some emerging technologies and I selected to look deeper into Social Television.  It is a very interesting topic because it is a hybrid of two already existing technologies that are used in completely different ways.  This new emerging technology is looking to take both of these previous technologies and merge them into basically a virtual version of the "water cooler" or some other social gathering at which people talk about what happened on the latest episode of their favorite technology.  I already have some personal experience with this technology through the Boxee program although I don't use the program to its fullest as I barely use the social media aspects of the program.  The overall concept of the technology that I described above is also interesting to think about in the general concept as it shows how a new technology can emerge by trying to use an old technology or social event as a source of inspiration for new ideas.

Podcast Diary Entry

http://jasonrhub.podomatic.com/entry/2011-09-18T17_13_11-07_00

Week 1 Reflections

Hello

Hello,

My name is Jason.  I currently live in New York City, but I did my BA at College Park with a few classes from UMUC.  I hope that we will have a good time in this class together.

Jason